Cyber attack suspected behind 2-hour NY Times website crash

The corporate and media web-sites of The New York Times experienced a lengthy outage on Wednesday that a source close to the matter said appeared to be caused by a cyber attack, although the newspaper cited a scheduled maintenance update.

The outage began around 11:30 AM ET and service appeared to be restored at about 1 PM ET.

When the New York Times website went dark, suspicions that it had been the target of a cyberattack were raised immediately.

According to the Fox News, sources said that the disruption was caused by a cyber attack while the newspaper maintained it to be a scheduled maintenance update.

The services were disturbed for an hour and half and NYT's official Twitter account said that they were experiencing a server issue that resulted in their e-mail and Web site being unavailable.

The report said that NYT cited an 'internal issue', a failure during regular maintenance of NYTimes.com and not the result of any cyber attack.

However, security analysts are pointing towards a malicious attack by hackers adding that it is very rare for an internal issue to cause this kind of damage.

Other security experts have cautioned that the outage could have indeed been due to an internal issue like a glitch within the central control system.

The company has been the target of Chinese hackers in the past and the latest attack led to disrupted sites including NYTimes.com and corporate site NYTco.com, the report added.

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